Japanese Seize the Day Trade

Rally in Stocks Lures
Individual Investors
Back to the Market

TOKYO -- A robust recovery in prices and proliferating online trading are luring back to Japan's stock market players largely missing in action for more than a decade: Japanese individuals.

Between January and October, individuals traded 231.9 billion shares of large-cap companies on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. That volume more than doubled the 106 billion shares individuals traded in all of last year and topped the previous annual record, set in 1988. In October, average trading volume on the Tokyo Stock Exchange was nearly...